An ontology of prokaryotic phenotypes and metabolic characters. MicrO was built to support the ongoing development of a natural language processing algorithm, Microbial Phenomics Information Extractor. MicrO consists of ~2550 classes derived from text contained in the taxonomic descriptions of diverse prokaryotic taxa that span the archaeal and bacterial domains of life. The largest categories of classes in the ontology include assays (enzymatic, metabolic, and phenotypic assays), microbiological culture media and media ingredients, and prokaryotic qualities.

Institution(s)

Department of Geosciences, University of Montana, Missoula, MT, USA; School of Information, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA; Department of Biological Sciences, University of Southern Maine, Portland, ME, USA; CyVerse, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA

Funding source(s)

This work was funded by grants from the National Science Foundation (award DEB-1208534, DEB-1208567 and DEB-1208685) and by a travel grant to attend the 2013 NESCent Ontologies for Evolutionary Biology workshop. It was also supported by CyVerse and the National Science Foundation under award numbers DBI-0735191 and DBI-1265383.